Keeping Secrets (7 page)

After that, the order had gotten all cattywampus. The next year Lester had taken ill, and so he’d gotten his coveted basketball, but he’d made it through, praise the Lord, though sometimes Virgie regretted the present as the
slap slap slap
of it against the house threatened to drive her to distraction.

What with one illness and another, Rosalie had been passed over. Virgie knew that the child understood, but it didn’t stop the tears of disappointment from welling in her eyes when the presents were all opened and once again hers was a pair of underdrawers or a new apron. Because Virgie knew that more than anything in the world Rosalie had always wanted a real doll.

She had seen the very doll of her dreams last fall in a store window in Natchitoches, the day William had loaded all the children into the wagon behind two mules for the trip for the Natchitoches Parish Fair. In the late afternoon, after a day filled with the wonders of the Snake Lady in her bespangled costume that made the boys gape and the girls avert their faces, caramel corn balls and meat pies bought with pennies saved all year, and the row after row of jars of prize golden peaches and bright red tomatoes, the hot dusty children had piled back into the wagon with Virgie and William to shop in Natchitoches for those store-bought items that couldn’t be purchased in Sweetwell.

There, in the cool dark Kendall’s Mercantile Store, while Virgie chose from the spools of thread and considered new needles for her treadle sewing machine, Rosalie saw the doll.

It was perched on the counter, out of her reach, but she wouldn’t have touched it anyway. She wouldn’t have dared.

The doll was like something out of a fairy tale, like Cinderella dressed for the ball. Its hair, real human hair, was like spun gold, parted down the middle and then twisted into a high knot atop her delicate head. A silver veil of the finest netting crowned the yellow curls. Her face was of porcelain, tinted blush pink at the cheeks and a rosier hue on her sweetly bowed lips. But the rest of the face was left its natural china white, and light seemed to shine through it, opalescent in the dim store. Her eyes were bright blue, with long fringed lashes that looked as if they had been dusted with gold. Beneath her slender neck began her dress of pale-blue taffeta, marked with what looked like rivulets of water. Virgie had once told her that the fabric was moiré, a kind of silk from France. Close upon her neck was a ruff of creamy lace. Below it marched a row of pearl buttons, tiny as seeds, down her slightly swelling bosom, ending at her wasplike waist. The sleeves of the dress belled out from the shoulder and then grew tight from the elbow down to her tiny wrists, where lacy trim matched that of the ruff. The skirt was full to the ankles, and just below the hem of it her delicate porcelain feet were enclosed in tiny black kid slippers. She was the most beautiful thing Rosalie had ever seen, beyond imagining.

Virgie had heard her daughter’s sharp intake of breath and turned to see her staring, as round-eyed as the doll. Virgie’s lips had tightened. Anger rose in her breast. She knew she ought to feel pity or sadness, but it was always anger that surged like bile when the children wanted something that they couldn’t have. Their wanting and the naked hunger in their eyes made her ashamed to be a country hick standing in a city store with her passel of children strung out behind her like biddy chickens.

She reached down and jerked Rosalie closer to her.

“Don’t you dare touch,” she said.

“Ma, I was just looking at her.” Rosalie’s cheeks burned hot. She knew that everyone in the store must be staring.

“There’s no point in wishing, girl. Your daddy works too hard for you to be having fancy ideas about things like that.”

Rosalie ducked her head. She’d get a whipping, she knew, if her mother saw her quick tears; she’d get something to cry about, all right. She turned and walked slowly, but not smartlike to make her mother angrier, out of the cool darkness of the store and across the wooden sidewalk back to the wagon, which was tied up outside on the town square. She climbed back in and sat beside Esther.

“What’s the matter, Ro? You look mad enough to spit.”

“Nothing.” Rosalie shook her head. Esther shrugged.

But something was wrong, Rosalie thought. Something was wrong when you couldn’t even look at a doll and dream.

A few weeks later as Virgie and William whispered late into the night in their bed, making Christmas plans, Virgie brought the doll up to her husband.

“We skipped her, you know,” she said to the long lanky man who had lain beside her more than half of her thirty-eight years. “If we don’t get it for her this year, it’ll probably be too late. She’ll come into her womanhood soon and be too old for dolls.”

“Virg!” William shushed her. Though he had fathered all of their twelve children right on this very mattress and had never seemed shy about that, he was uncomfortable at any mention of what he called “women’s business.”

“Well, I wish you’d think about it.” Virgie snuggled closer to him, but not too close. She didn’t want to even think about risking another baby so soon.

“It’s a lot of money, Virg.”

“I know.” She rolled over and let it drop.

But a few Saturdays later, without saying a word more about it, he’d ridden into Natchitoches and on his return pressed a newspaper-wrapped bundle into Virgie’s hand. She could tell from the shape of it that it was the doll.

Now it lay among the clutter of the other packages under the Christmas tree. Virgie couldn’t wait for her family to finish dinner so they could open their presents and she could see the expression on Ro’s face.

Now there it was. As the skinny little girl in her faded blue flour-sack dress slowly unwound the string and then unwrapped the paper, she raised her wide hazel eyes from the doll’s long blue watered silk, her mouth a perfect O.

She gazed first at Virgie, then at William, then back to the doll again, shaking her head over and over.

“Momma, Pa,” she cried, racing into their open arms and crushing her thin chest against theirs, but carefully holding her treasure to one side.

“It’s all right, Ro,” Virgie whispered into her ear. “Merry Christmas.”

The Norris boys expressed little interest in her special present, disappearing into their room to try on new denim overalls, socks and coats of sensible navy wool, but the girls all gathered round.

“Look,” said little Nancy as Rosalie lowered the doll’s head, “her eyes close.” They did indeed. Rosalie held her breath. Were their brilliant blue lost somewhere in her head forever? But no, when she lifted the doll perpendicular, there they were again.

The doll’s jointed head moved, too. “Careful,” Virgie cautioned. “Not too far.” The arms, the legs moved, and the doll could even bend over at her tiny waist.

“Does she have drawers?” Janey whispered. Rosalie wiped her hand on her lap and carefully lifted the hem of the doll’s dress to see lace-trimmed pantaloons.

Esther asked, “What are you going to call her?”

“Gloria,” Rosalie answered without skipping a beat. She’d known the doll’s name the first time she’d laid eyes on her in Kendall’s Mercantile Store.

“Like morning glory, blue morning glory?” Lucille always seemed to know what was going on in Rosalie’s head.

“Yes. And
Gloria in excelsis Deo
. From the hymn at church.”

Virgie snorted, “Lord, Lord. Put her away now. Girls, come on. Let’s get this table cleared.”

For the rest of the day, Rosalie was on a cloud. She did her chores as always, taking her turn changing the baby and the other little ones, carrying water from the well, filling the big iron pot on the back of the stove, gathering eggs from under the hateful pecking hens, carrying in pails of foaming milk from the evening milking. But every chance she got, she slipped back into the girls’ room and sneaked a look at Gloria, her blue eyes closed, asleep in a nest fashioned of an old baby quilt atop the chifforobe.

That night, after a supper of leftovers which had sat all afternoon on the table covered over with a clean tablecloth, she brought Gloria back into the kitchen to play with her while the family sat around the evening fire.

“Can I hold her?” Florence asked.

Rosalie hesitated, but Virgie caught her eye. Even if Gloria was hers, she had to share.

“Here.” She handed the doll over. “But be careful.”

Florence was careful, as were Esther, Janey, Lucille and even little Nancy. When Gloria had made the circle and was safely back in her arms, Rosalie sighed with relief.

Then, “What about me?” asked the gruff voice, still changing, of her older brother England. “Can I see the dolly, too?” He stepped forward, holding out his big rough hands.

Rosalie looked from his hands to Gloria to the eyes of her mother. She found no help there. Nor in the half-closed eyes of her father, leaned back in his rocking chair enjoying his pipe, a pleasure reserved for special occasions.

“He won’t hurt your dolly, Rosalie,” Virgie said.

But England’s sooty hands, never really clean in the cracks from his dirty work of smithing and shoeing, would snag and stain the fragile blue silk of Gloria’s dress. But she’d just have to bear it.

“Well, isn’t she a beauty. Look at that complexion. Bet she never hoed a row of cotton in her life,” he teased and smiled into Rosalie’s eyes. He held Gloria up and twirled her skirt, and, in the twirling, something caught, and she fell.

The porcelain smashed into a hundred little petal pink-and-white pieces, shining in the firelight.

Gloria’s soft body was intact, but her head, her hands and her feet were broken, as was Rosalie’s heart.

It didn’t matter that England was sorry. It didn’t matter when Virgie made her a rag doll to fill the blue silk dress. The beautiful Gloria was gone before Rosalie had had a chance to love her.

And Rosalie knew that that was the way of the world. It didn’t do to want too much, to expect anything, she told herself when she’d finished with the mourning and the crying herself to sleep at night. Life was hard and painful, and she was poor, and that was the way it was always going to be. But life would be less bitter if she didn’t expect it to be sweet.

* * *

That didn’t mean that she had to spend the rest of her life on the farm, though. She was willing to work hard, to do anything, but Rosalie didn’t want to spend all her days like her mother—washing, cleaning, cooking, tending after a whole mess of kids. The only way she could see to escape was to use her brains. Her teachers had always said she had plenty. There had to be a way they could earn her a living.

But when she finished the eleventh grade, where was she going to get the money to go on? It cost over four hundred dollars for the two years of normal school in Natchitoches.

Her brother England stepped forward. “I’ll lend it to you.” How would he scrape together the money from the few pennies he had earned on his small farm near home? But she was his favorite, and he’d always been a good boy.

The two years flew by. She was on her own, and though her job in the school kitchen was much like the chores she did on the farm, this was different, for there were her studies, the books, the lectures, the endless pages of empty blue lines to fill with notes that would enable her to stay away from the farm forever, maybe even to be a teacher.

And it was the twenties. Even in the rural backwater of Natchitoches there were short skirts, bobbed hair, jazzy music on the Victrola, new daring dances, and boys with slicked hair who came to call at the dormitories with silk bow ties beneath their sun-reddened Adam’s apples.

Rosalie went out with a few of them but no one in particular. She didn’t have time for all that foolishness. She had to get ahead in school if she was ever going to make anything of herself. She’d seen, boy, had she seen, in her mother’s swelling belly every spring, what boys could do for you. That’s all they were after, anyway, when you got right down to it. She was not interested. No, thank you.

For no matter how sweet the moonlight, the words, and the promises whispered out in a canoe late at night, they didn’t mean a hoot when you had a passel of children underfoot and could see nothing looking you in the face for the next twenty years but the raising of them, with precious little help from that young man who sat next to you now trying to nuzzle closer to the buttons of your white organdy blouse. They could jazz her and razzmatazz her, but when it came to serious business Rosalie would make whatever she made of herself on her own.

So it was that two years later, with her normal-school diploma held proudly in her hand, she kissed her friends and family goodbye and set out alone to the eastern part of the state and nurse’s training with the nuns at the hospital in Cypress. There were no teaching jobs to be had, so, as always, Rosalie would make do. It was her twentieth year, 1928.

It wasn’t long, of course, before everyone began to realize that the crashing of the stock market that next year wasn’t going to affect just the rich. The poor, like Rosalie, would become even poorer.

Soon there was no way to make ends meet. She couldn’t find a job to pay for her training and there was no hope of help from home, for if they hadn’t been able to raise their own food on the farm her family would have starved.

All of which was no more and no less than she expected. She hadn’t really thought that she was going to get away with it, that even with education she could escape. Book learning wouldn’t do it in these desperate times they had now started to call the Depression. Hard work, if she could find it, was what it was going to take simply to survive.